In the period after high school, most of my friends moved out of town. While I never really "partied" as such, I started attending parties with folks I knew from working at Mervyns. I met John at one of these parties. Both he and I seemed out of place. While top-40 music blared inside and folks played drinking games around us, we found ourselves discussing avante garde cinema, specifically German surrealism. We were mutually excited about the 1919 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which no one else at the party had even heard of. John was a filmmaker himself, as well as an occasional songwriter. Over the next few years, we would collaborate on several projects which never fully saw the light of day, both in film (where I functioned as a sound technician) and in music.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

John had a concept of a film and song cycle which brought together his autobiography, a motif involving drive-in movie theaters, and the history of rock and roll music. We wrote a bunch of songs for the project. Or, to be truthful, John brought me the concept for the song, a hook, and a few words, to which I would add music, verses, and then generally fine tune it into a usable song.

This Drive-in may have been the original inspiration...

Several of these songs were recorded, with my brother Larry playing guitar, John's friend Gary playing drums, and me on bass. John did lead vocals. Of these, probably the one the band had the most fun with was "She's So Surreal." It was our nod to psychedelic rock, an era near and dear to everyone in the band. It was also the most actually collaborative songwriting John and I did. I remember hanging out at John's place with my guitar. He'd show me his words, I'd play a bit of music, he'd improvise a melody over the music. We'd fine tune to words to fit with the melody. "Like Dali's clocks whose hands have stopped in a moment for eternity/scrambled eggs and shattered senses is what she makes of me/her words are unpublished poetry/she's so surreal." We threw lines back and forth until they stuck.

At one point I got up to go to the bathroom. "I knew a girl like the girl in this song once," I shouted out to him.

"What happened to her?" he called back.

"Last I heard, she moved to Canada. Going to lead Sierra Treks or something like that."

"Would you say she was sliding through the wilderness on a Freudian slip?"

"Huh?"

John was writing down whatever I was saying and then turning it into couplets. And that's how this song came to be.

There's another recording of it somewhere, with John, Gary, and Larry playing on it. On a tape. I'd forgotten about the song for years, until I was listening to Rhino Records delightful Nuggets box set and was inspired to record a few of my songs in the style of mid-sixties psychedelic punk. "She's So Surreal" was an obvious choice. I did a quick demo of it, and never did anything further with the project. Until now. A finished version of the song, with me playing guitar and organ over a programmed bass and drum part can be found here for your listening... for your listening.

Larry (left) and John (right) learn a new song.